VMware and Networking

I'm playing around with a new VM deployment and was wondering if I could get a bit of advice on something. I have a Dell MD3200i with two controllers and a couple of Dell R710's, each with 12 physical NICs and a couple of powerconnect switches. I'm happy with my physical network setup, and the MD3200i setup as per the Dell Deployment guide but what I was wondering about was the IP setup on the R710's vmnics on the iSCSI bindings.

With the first setup I am seeing a lot of 'Lost Access to volume' errors in ESXi connecting back to the MD3200i and other connectivity issues - lost links, restored links, uplink redundancy restored etc.

Hi, I am abit concerned with you using 2 switches and 4 subnets? We have deployed a few SAN's (Dell, HP, Storagelfex, EMC etc) and some of them did have dual controllers with 4 ports.
I would suggest your ideal set up to be as below:

If you have hardware ISCSI enabled ,you need to associate these swithces with the appropriate hba's, and if you are using software iscsi, you need to associate both these switches to the software iscsi hba.

I was going to duplicate this setup on a seconf R710 but have the iSCSI connections on that physical box use the 192.168.12.x and 192.168.13.x subnets abnd split them between the two switches as above.

Or...shoudl I be using one from each of the 4 subnets on each server?

I am try to ensure maximum throughput and maximum failover/redundancy between the MD3200, the switches and the R710 hosts

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If 4 subnets is suggested, I would use 4 different subnets on each host, rather than 2 per host.
Essentially you are trying to ensure you have 4 different paths to the controller. If you use 2 per host, you are providing 2 nics from host, to a single port per controller.

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Dipper29Author Commented: 2011-10-06

That was my thought as well, I was just looking for a bit of advice to see if my thinking was correct, which you have provided ;)

Appreciate the responses ;)

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Dipper29Author Commented: 2011-10-06

So, I'll put in my final 'live' configuration, if it helps anyone in the future: